Anne Marie Dolan, 63

Anne Marie Dolan went to be with her Lord soon after the full moon rose in the North Idaho evening sky in mid-October. Nearing her 64th birthday, she passed away peacefully in her home near the Fairway golf course in Coeur d’Alene. Born and raised in nearby Spirit Lake, her father, Philip, was a WWII vet and a prominent Cd'A attorney following his war-delayed graduation from Gonzaga Law School in the late 1940s. Her mother, Mary, who grew up in Oregon and later trained as a nurse at Sacred Heart in Spokane, married her father in Seattle in 1947. 

Anne’s devoted parents and two well-loved oldest brothers, Stephen and James, are deceased. She is survived by her brothers, Timothy and David, three sisters-in-law, Janet, Becky and Debbie, and seven nephews and two nieces who have, in turn, contributed many more relatives to Anne’s growing family. 

There was great joy in the Dolan household on Cd'A Avenue when Anne was brought home from nearby Lake City Hospital just before New Year’s Day in 1960. Her face lit up when her four older brothers — aged 5 to 11 — hovered over her, as they frequently did. However, signs soon began to indicate something was amiss. It was later determined her cranium was growing abnormally slowly, leaving her mentally impaired. Despite her handicap, Anne continued to delight in her family as she grew older. With their help and some excellent special ed teachers, she eventually learned to speak fairly well and later to read and write to a fair extent. 

Anne’s parents took their daughter to the UW Medical Center in Seattle for specialized pediatric evaluation and care. It was quickly confirmed that her cranium was growing very slowly, if at all. It was later determined that while her internal brain was in good condition, those functions located near her skull, like speech and motor skills, were the most impaired. With growing alarm, maternity wards across America were noting a spike in the number of deformed babies being born in the early 60s. It was later revealed that a widely used, legally prescribed medication was behind most of the deformities. 

During the first 12 years of her life, Anne was a happy and contented child. She loved traveling annually with her family to visit her paternal grandparents in Seattle, who, like everyone else, always smothered her with love. She enjoyed summers with relatives and friends at the old Dolan cabin on Spirit Lake, learning how to swim fairly well. Always curious and people-orientated, she would wander off for hours to visit her nearby relatives and neighbors on the lake. Everyone welcomed her with love and smiles. During school years in town, Annie often hung out with her brothers and their friends around the family pool table in the basement of their new, larger home on Foster Avenue. They always warmly welcomed her whenever she appeared. 

At her doctor’s suggestion, Anne’s parents bought a dog to give her some extra companionship. She chose the puppy herself, an English springer spaniel named Princess. Although the professional dog breeder in Hayden said she was planning to keep that especially beautiful puppy for show, she couldn’t turn Annie down when she wanted the showiest pup in the litter. She nicknamed her dog Prinie but also called her Shorty because of her short tail. Like the protective bodyguard that she was, Princess always accompanied Annie on her Spirit Lake ventures, where her faithful dog was buried by her tearful father in 1979. 

Anne was visibly excited when her youngest brother, Dave, then a senior at Cd'A High, played the lead role of Pied Piper in the school arts auditorium. She clapped with delight as he led “the rats” of Hamelin down the center aisle, most of whom she knew. After that, she would always request flutes among her annual birthday gifts. She loved to hear her brother, Tim, talking with his ventriloquist puppet or playing his banjo. She giggled joyfully whenever her four brothers sang at family gatherings in their barbershop quartet style. She loved riding in the family speedboat every summer, watching her older brothers and friends water ski on the lake. 

As a teenager, Anne proudly participated in several Special Olympics games. Due to the generosity of her parents, she and her caregiver companions visited Disneyland, Disney World and other famous places. Although she couldn’t ice skate very well, Annie became a devoted fan of 1976 Olympic gold medalist Dorothy Hamill, who she’d later meet at an Ice Capades show in Spokane. She fell in love with “The Fonz” (Henry Winkler) from the popular Happy Days T.V. sitcom, who kindly, like Hamill, personally autographed a poster of himself that she cherished. She would later ask people to call her “The Fonz,” often imitating his usual thumbs-up greetings on the show. 

Anne came to understand that her father was born and raised in his beloved Spirit Lake. Distressed at the continuing decline of his once-thriving childhood hometown, he would later use his seat on the county’s Planning and Zoning Commission to help push forward a new high school there (Timberlake). Soon after Anne’s birth, her parents donated land to build the town's new Catholic Church, where she happily attended the 1972 wedding of her beloved brother, Steve, and his bride, Janet. Several decades later, Phil donated a corner lot on Highway 41 to bring a bank back to town, another longtime goal. 

As she grew older, Anne was taken by her family to the growing town’s verdant Greenwood Cemetery to see her paternal grandparents' and great-grandmother’s headstones, along with many other departed relatives and friends. One of the highlights of her year was riding in the lead car — usually an open convertible — in the annual Spirit Lake Fourth of July parade. Annie’s last ride was this year in her oldest nephew Ed’s vintage ‘53 Oldsmobile Rocket 88. 

Anne loved her brothers and their families very much. From pictures and home videos, she understood that Steve ran a large Seattle-area Boise Cascade lumber yard with over 100 employees. She knew Jim worked in finance in Seattle (ER Jones) and helped her dad manage her money. She knew Tim had been a pastor at two churches over on the coast and that he later taught at Whitworth University in Spokane. She came to understand that Dave was a journalist working in far-away Jerusalem (33 years), where her Lord was crucified and rose from the dead. She also knew he’d written several books and spoken at venues all over the world. 

Both as a child and an adult, Anne enjoyed dancing to all kinds of music. She especially loved hearing her precious mother sing in her strong, pitch-perfect operatic voice both at home and during Catholic mass. In the mid-1970s, Dave, then a disc jockey at KVNI, arranged with his parents to ensure she listened whenever he played her favorite songs. She especially liked Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the Muppets' “It’s Not Easy Being Green,” both of which he dedicated to her. Of course, these well-known songs speak of being different and overcoming adversities while looking for a better future. 

As she grew older, Anne remained a happy child for the most part. Then, the state unwisely announced in early 1972 that they would begin “mainstreaming” special needs pupils into regular public schools after the summer break. Along with other parents, Phil and Mary were not happy when they learned their handicapped sons and daughters would suddenly be thrust into a cauldron of hundreds of “normal” pupils who might be encountering such kids for the first time. Indeed, their worst fears quickly came true. Many pupils mocked and ridiculed the strange new students in their midst. Dozens of special needs parents received hasty phone calls to come pick up their child, who they mostly discovered in tears. It wasn’t long before those parents who could afford to pulled their children out of the public system, with many sending them to a small private school, Olaf Bustad, which Phil helped establish in Cd'A. 

Although the state later canceled the unpopular program, the damage had been done. Just beginning her teenage years and puberty, Annie now realized that the world out there was not the loving, protective, warm bubble she’d lived in for 12 years. Soon, it became difficult for her family to take her out to restaurants or other public places since she would sometimes throw a loud, childlike fit, but in a teenage body. 

As they aged, Phil and Mary found it hard to cope with Anne’s unpredictable outbursts, which she always apologized for afterwards. When she turned 18, they decided to purchase a large group home on Hayden Avenue where she and other special (meaning extra) needs young adults could live together with 24/7 care. They would frequently drop by to visit their only daughter, who thankfully liked her new home and companions. They brought her home for all major holidays and her Dec. 28 birthday — always the most important day of the year for her. 

In late 2001, Anne moved to a new family-owned group home on Fairway Drive. She was often visited by her faithful “best friend,” Laura Kilmartin, and by Laura Degenhardt and Shelley Bruna, Phil’s secretaries. Much thanks to them and Annie’s many caregivers over the years, including her first group home manager, Alex Rodgers, Nan Motz, Alex Mingus, Sherry Yow, Terry Werkheiser and Amanda Smithson. 

Well-loved in Kootenai County, Mary Louise Dolan found it especially disturbing that her only daughter was most likely born handicapped due to a legally prescribed medication she had taken in 1960. As her daughter transitioned from a happy child into a more troubled teen, she found great comfort and support from her closest female friends, including her longtime best friend and look-alike, Miriam Daugherty, whose husband, Duane, and oldest daughter, Barb, lovingly took care of Anne’s medical needs. Other close friends included Mary Ann McHugh and Fern Johnston, whose husbands served as Cd'A mayors in the 1970s; Betty McLain, who chaired the business department at North Idaho College; Jean Reagan, Lola Hagadone, Marjorie Moate, Joyce Ekness and Chic King, wife of then Cd'A Press publisher Pat King. Mary and Phil also appreciated frequent prayers from the Poor Clare nuns in Spokane, where one of Phil’s sisters had lived since the 1950s. 

As Annie’s parents reached their late 70s (Phil passed away at 92 on Jan. 11, 2011, and Mary near 90 during Mother’s Day weekend in 2014), it became increasingly difficult for them to visit her and make holiday arrangements, etc. Always even-tempered and protective of his younger siblings, brother Steve increasingly acted as Anne’s surrogate father, and his wife, Janet, her surrogate mother. Although she was widowed with Steve’s passing in 2018, Janet continued in that role until the day Annie went to be with her Lord. She was strongly supported by her new husband, Charlie Hoover, a widower who she met, appropriately, at Annie’s Cafe in Spirit Lake. Anne immediately took a shine to Charlie, who worked many years at NASA in Houston. The family deeply thanks them for their selfless devotion and work on Anne’s behalf, especially as her health declined during her last months on Earth. 

Anne’s name is being publicly memorialized in places besides her headstone next to her parent’s grave in Spirit Lake. It has long been displayed, along with their names and her siblings, on public plaques in Cd’A and Spokane. This is due to the generosity of her philanthropic parents, both raised in humble households. Growing up as they did, they were blessed to be able to donate expensive land and/or money to two area institutions: Kootenai Hospital and Gonzaga University — thus the public plaques. 

Anne’s protective father grew up during the Great Depression with his five siblings in Spirit Lake, where his father, George, had moved with his mother, Mary, and 11 siblings from Wisconsin in 1912. Her gentle grandfather managed the Panhandle lumber mill’s railroad roundhouse, supervising workers loading lumber products onto trains bound for Spokane. Along with his father and brothers George and Jim, Phil fiercely fought the raging forest fire that destroyed part of the mill in August 1939. 

Anne’s father had been planning to work another year on the mill’s green chain to earn enough money to enter law school at Gonzaga. With the mill shut down, he could only get odd jobs during 1940 and didn’t earn enough to pay his tuition. His father couldn't help much since he was also out of work. Already enrolled in pre-med at Gonzaga, his best friend, Ed Hamacher — later a well-known plastic surgeon at Sacred Heart — persuaded the Jesuits to allow his hard-working friend to enroll that September, doing maintenance jobs to pay his tuition, the first time they had ever agreed to that arrangement. He later paid them back by donating $1 million as seed money for their new law library, which opened in May 2000 with a plaque in his family’s honor, including Anne’s name. He told his family that while fixing broken water pipes and unclogging toilets on campus, he never dreamed he could one day donate such a generous gift in his family’s name. 

Phil had a knack for real estate, purchasing several rural lots in the 1950s and '60s that he later sold at a hefty profit. Knowing that Interstate 90 was being moved from its downtown Cd'A route to a new section north of town and that the state was considering moving Highway 95 from its then Government Way route to a new road further to the west, he bought a small farm next to where he forecast the two highways would intersect. He later sold part of the farm to Cd'A’s two hospitals, which combined resources to build the new Kootenai hospital. Along with her family, Anne was later memorialized on a plaque in the lobby of the new cardiovascular wing of the hospital, built on land donated by Phil and Mary in 2002. 

Anne Marie Dolan was escorted by the angels to be with her Lord just as the annual Feast of Tabernacles festival was beginning Oct. 16. It commemorates the ancient Jewish people dwelling in temporary shelters while making their way from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. Annie’s bodily shelter was not the easiest to live in, but we take great comfort in knowing her sufferings on earth have ended, replaced by her glorious new home in heaven with her Savior and departed family and friends.